Do you think it's an impossible connection between this phenomenon and reincarnation?
 And what?
 Reincarnation.
 Well, we talked a little bit this morning about the relationship of these ideas to death
 and how shamans claim that they're seeing into a world of souls.
 I don't know.
 I find it... the thing which really got me is the presence of these English-speaking
 entities in the trance.
 I mean, that I did not expect.
 From Jung and from Freud, you expect residual memories, but not these entities, these beings.
 And then the question is, where are they?
 Who are they?
 Well, a conservative... the possibilities are fairly limited.
 They are either dead people, because they are clearly more like people than like animals.
 They, after all, speak and communicate and have intentionality in a purely intellectual realm.
 So that means they're like people, but they're not like anybody you've ever seen.
 So are they dead people?
 That's one possibility.
 Or are they extraterrestrials?
 Well, that's another possibility, but the problem is we've never seen an extraterrestrial.
 We've got dead people all over the place.
 We know that they're dead people, but we don't know if anything survives bodily death.
 Well, then the other source is, are they from the future?
 Are they future people?
 We see people now, so we can extrapolate there must be people in the future.
 They might be different from us.
 Perhaps they could come back.
 So those are the fairly uncomfortable and limited choices.
 They're either an advanced state of humanity, they're the souls of the dead,
 or they're some kind of extraterrestrial dwellers in a parallel continuum.
 Well, now, you're supposed to generate hypotheses conservatively.
 That means that the dead lead by a mile, just by logical deduction.
 So the strangest hypothesis turns out to be the most likely, that these are the souls of the dead,
 and it's possible that reincarnation is something where at a certain point in historical time,
 we find out about it.
 We learn literally the secrets of death.
 I mean, this would be big news.
 It would be quite a surprise to the forward thrust of scientific rationalism,
 if what it was going to lead to was an opening, a communication line to the ancestors.
 I just wanted to hear about the Peyote Church, because it seems to really fit.
 I had questions about initiation, because I think that's really missing in a lot of this material.
 I just wanted to share one vision I had in Peyote during my ceremony,
 and that was there was a feeling inside my body that something was going up and down my spine,
 or something was moving around.
 When I closed my eyes, there was a bird flying around inside my body.
 And as I got deeper into it, there was a flock, and then there was a lake, and then there was forests.
 And then I started crying, because it was just very pristine and beautiful.
 And it got wider and wider in there, and other species that are now extinct started appearing and saying,
 "Don't worry, we've all gone inside,"
 which was really too much for me to take, because it was really a sense of what these Indian people
 have been teaching me in the past ten years, is that the ancestors do exist.
 Death is simply taking off masks, and that they do come and teach, and that they do live inside,
 and that there is and has been and always will be a way of communicating to the past, our past,
 since we have time in this linear way, to ask for information on that.
 And I'm real interested in just again asking about initiation, in the sense that I feel that a lot of the things
 that's missing here is the context of the circle of people who are committed to ceremony,
 which is historically and otherwise really the setting that gives us the return to that state
 that we were talking about earlier, which was that group consensus sense of support and love
 and sharing the clan, the tribe, and everything.
 Do you see, for instance, use of psychedelics moving in a ceremonial or ritual fashion
 in a way of creating new ways of coming together as people to heal that circle of shield?
 Well, where it's most enduring, I think this is how it ends up being done.
 People do the work on their own, but then they tend to form into circles.
 This is how I think the serious psychedelic voyaging gets done,
 because the circle gives people permission and courage.
 If we had an unbroken cultural tradition, we would be initiated by master shamans.
 As it is, we've had to sort of reinvent the whole of the world's oldest religion,
 and we haven't done that bad a job.
 I mean, we shouldn't feel that we have to fault ourselves.
 The anthropological literature of the world is vast, and if you spend time with it,
 you will know more about these things on a certain level than most people in a traditional culture.
 It was very interesting being in the Amazon.
 You would go with the people, and they would show you their plants,
 and it might come up that you would say,
 "Did you know that the Konibbo, who live 50 miles away from you,
 also use this plant, and they call it X?"
 And they would just be astonished.
 "How do you know this?"
 Well, you couldn't explain that you had read it in a Harvard Museum botanical leaflet,
 but that was how you knew it.
 You knew it because you'd done your homework.
 So what they had was tremendous vertical initiation into one culture,
 but what you can bring to this that is very useful and respected
 is a tremendous general knowledge about this.
 Say, "Well, did you know that in Africa people use the same plant, and they do it like this?"
 Or, "Did you know that in Indonesia similar practices are going on?"
 And so we've reconstructed a shamanism,
 but from then spending time with ayahuasqueros in the Amazon
 and other kinds of shamans in other places,
 I really see that it wasn't as formal as we thought.
 There are rituals and songs and techniques,
 but the spirit of shamanism is open-minded and open-ended,
 and these people are really doing this out of curiosity to find out.
 The mythological structures created by any kind of shamanic system
 are largely for the consumption of the client, not the shaman.
 The shaman knows that this is all provisional,
 and what we found with the shamans in the Amazon was great curiosity,
 great willingness to try out novel concepts,
 to integrate weird ideas into their own cosmology,
 electromagnetism, viruses, computers.
 They loved all these things because they saw them as metaphors
 that they could integrate into their visions.
 The flying saucer is a metaphor like this,
 very strong in the ayahuasca mythology.
 Liz, did you want to say something?
 You said earlier today, or yesterday, sometimes,
 I guess I have to write things down,
 the domain in which we operate lies within our minds.
 And I'd like to know how that--
 I'm always confused about real and not real.
 All these realities you've been describing,
 the little elves, etc., etc.,
 are they aligned? And is the English--
 because that's the language you're most familiar with?
 Well, I think what I meant when I said
 the domains in which we operate are all within our minds
 is that inside culture it's all whatever we say it is.
 In other words, other than that it's day and night,
 nature doesn't say much to us.
 We pursue our activities all inside a construct of culture
 that comes out of language.
 So that's what I meant when I said
 that it's all within the domain of our minds.
 I mean, it's all within the human world
 and potentially affected by the human mind.
 The problem of real and unreal,
 which is supposed to be a naive problem,
 is one I have, too.
 I think that the real world is so strange
 that it's just almost too freakish to suppose.
 You know, I quote all the time J.B.S. Haldane,
 who said, "The world is not only stranger than we suppose,
 it's stranger than we can suppose."
 This is a tremendous liberation once you grab onto it.
 It's really true. I mean, how many of you know that?
 That it's really true that the world at any moment
 could come completely and utterly apart.
 And have you seen that happen?
 You know, that's really what I'm concerned to communicate
 is the provisional nature of reality.
 It does have a certain momentum, and thank God for it,
 because who could stand it if it were always coming unglued?
 But on the other hand, if you're an edge runner,
 if you keep poking, there are these things you can do,
 and then it just springs to pieces.
 And I don't say it's all lies.
 It doesn't seem to operate in the domain of truth and lies.
 It's just that this is all just such a limited slice to what's possible.
 That was very liberating for me to find out.
 I remember the first time I smoked DMT, and when I came down,
 they practically had to hog-tie me,
 and all I could say was, "I can't believe it.
 I cannot believe it."
 And I couldn't. I still can't.
 I mean, the whole impetus for my career is to convince myself
 that somebody else has seen the same thing,
 and that they can't believe it either.
 Because it's so weird that it always floats to the top.
 It always calms down and turns back into this,
 rooms full of people sitting, listening.
 But beneath that is just this really unspeakably bizarre thing.
 Not as we're told it should be.
 In fact, as we're told it isn't.
 The one thing they tell you it isn't, it is.
 It is. It is made of magic.
 Anything can happen.
 I mean, to have elves by the thousands pouring into your apartment,
 how can a rational...
 What is a person to do with that?
 Because what happens is that in a single moment,
 in the privacy of your own reality,
 it's revealed to you that all of history is a mistake,
 a delusion, a horrible misunderstanding,
 but you're given no evidence,
 only the conviction that this is so.
 And then you're set down among your fellows,
 and they don't know what you're talking about,
 can't understand why you've become so agitated and addled.
 And I think this is what we all as psychedelic people live with.
 And we suspect each other.
 We can't be sure that anybody has ever really seen
 the true naked heart of the stone but ourselves.
 And so then it's this tremendous catalyst to language,
 to try and build metaphors,
 to try and get the nod of recognition so that we are satisfied.
 It's not really stranger than the real world, would you say?
 It is the real world.
 I mean, in the so-called real world.
 I mean, that's...
 Well, it's more brightly colored.
 It's moving faster.
 Why is it so brightly colored?
 Why is it moving faster?
 What I've noticed in my DMT experiences,
 and when I realized this, it was with a certain amount of horror,
 was you break into this space.
 It's dome-like, it's warm, it's diffusely lit.
 There are all these self-transforming machine elves and their toys,
 and they also are singing and condensing and making objects
 and so forth and so on.
 The whole thing is like triggers just wonder,
 cascades of wonder.
 But then I realized after seeing this several times
 and trying to pay attention and hold my mind steady
 that this is someone's idea of a reassuring environment for human beings.
 It is, in fact, literally a playpen of some sort.
 Well, that means that I'm not seeing who's ever on the other side.
 I am emerging into an artificial construct of some sort,
 entirely their creation.
 Well, then it just begins to lift this veil,
 and this howling begins, and you just begin to fall forward into it,
 and you realize, you know, it is the Sephiroth and the Shekinah.
 It is the howling between the worlds,
 but it is approached through an infinite number of veils
 that reassure, coddle, control, confine.
 But you can move toward it as fast as you dare.
 But it is entirely transforming and entirely real.
 It was a great realization for me to understand
 that there was no limit to how far you could go,
 that we all make a certain choice.
 Once you discover psychedelics,
 always before that spiritual progress is, you know, grunt work,
 suddenly you're standing on ice cubes in terms of spiritual progress
 and how you make it.
 How do you control it?
 And the answer is, most people go a certain distance and then give up, get off,
 stand there and talk about it.
 But there's nothing holding any of us back
 from becoming unrecognizable not only to our friends and loved ones,
 but to ourselves.
 You know, the stories told of the Taoist guy up on Cold Mountain
 and he's been up there 25 years and occasionally people see him
 and yes, he's still alive.
 Well, any one of us could become that person,
 could march off into a dimension of magical narcissism
 so alien to the concerns of other people
 that we would have to go and live up on the crags and in the mist
 and eat bird nests or whatever they do up there.
 So then that puts a whole different light on the spiritual quest
 because it means that we're holding it back
 rather than lashing it forward to ever greater exertion.
 And I think that's the proper attitude
 because the depth of spirit is infinite
 and in its benevolence toward suffering humanity
 it has made itself available in infinite amounts.
 So then it's for us to somehow come to terms with this.
 It's like having a living religion.
 It is having a living religion
 because it's having an infinite source of gnosis,
 of understanding available.
 Somebody, yes?
 [inaudible]
 Well, it teaches you to sit still,
 which is a precondition for psychedelics.
 I mean, you know, keeping still is one of the hexagrams of the I Ching.
 People often ask the question you asked, or in slightly different forms,
 they say, "Well, isn't there another way to get there?
 Is it so narrow? Is it so specific to these plants?"
 And, you know, the truth is, I don't know.
 I'm not an expert. All I know is based on my experience.
 In my experience, these things can only be approached this way
 and who would want to approach them any other way?
 I mean, we don't want this to become so generalized
 that by closing your eyes and ripping off a few om tat sats
 you fall into the kind of states I'm talking about.
 I mean, that would be extremely unwelcome and nearly pathological.
 I don't understand this problem with how you achieve it.
 To my mind, obviously you can't do it by yourself.
 Obviously you can't do it on the natch
 because it's a meeting with another entity.
 There has to be an other, and it has to be objectified,
 even if it says a plant or a mushroom.
 So, basically how I read these meditation texts is
 they teach you about psychological phenomena.
 They teach you what you may see when you close your eyes
 and sit for days and watch.
 The thing about meditation in my own experience
 is that it's just tremendously boring.
 However, everything you're doing will be very useful to you
 when you take a psychedelic.
 Then it works.
 Then there is this flow of imagery.
 I am maybe a very lumpen person,
 but that's all right because a lot of us are lumpen
 and I wish to speak for that slice.
 There may be supreme esthetes
 balanced on such razor's edge of metabolic peculiarity
 that at every moment they are at one with the mystery.
 But that butters no bread for the rest of us.
 We're trying to create a kind of democratic consensus here
 about this stuff.
 It seems to me the plants were put there for this purpose
 and they achieve it so easily.
 I mean, I practiced yoga at times in the past
 and had some amount of success
 with triggering exotic psychological states.
 But they were very difficult and time-consuming
 and then they always told you that wasn't what it was about anyway
 and you were becoming distracted by phenomena.
 Well, why bridle then just chowing down on five grams of mushrooms
 with the knowledge that you'll be fine in 12 hours?
 So it's really a matter of using the tools.
 There are all kinds of altered states, weird states,
 states of sexual abstinence
 and states of various kinds of agitation and this and that.
 But what I'm interested in is just this very specific set of phenomena
 and I don't really make any claim for it to say, you know,
 this is the spiritual path.
 I don't say that.
 What I say is this is the most interesting thing around.
 But it's very specific.
 For instance, I don't like drugs which mess with your mind
 in the sense of that distort your value-assessing ability.
 The drug which comes to mind is ketamine.
 Ketamine is an extremely powerful synthetic drug that creates an experience
 which if you haven't had ketamine you don't know what this experience is.
 It's that specific to it.
 But, hell, the house could burn down around you
 and it would arrive as an unconfirmable rumor
 on the dark side of your metaphysical imagination with this stuff.
 You would never lift a hair.
 It would never enter your mind that there was a problem.
 Dhatura is like this too.
 Dhatura severely distorts reality.
 The day I knew that my experiments with Dhatura had come to an end
 was one day in Nepal.
 I was talking to a friend of mine in the market
 about his Dhatura experiments and how much he'd been taking recently.
 And in the course of the conversation it came out
 that he thought we were in his apartment.
 And I realized looking at this poor soul
 that there had been severe degradation of core information processing
 and that we had to get back on the wagon
 or we weren't going to get out of there.
 So then let me describe for a moment the state of mind on DMT.
 There is a tendency to give way to absolute astonishment.
 But if you can hold that back
 and pay very close attention to what's going on
 you will discover that it didn't do anything to you.
 That here you are suddenly in the midst of a raging universe of hallucination
 and you are you.
 And you are who you were before.
 And it has not in any way inflated, repressed, suppressed, distorted or skewed anything.
 You're just saying, "Aha, wow, I'm really smashed."
 The input is reaching overload.
 But there must be this core observer who's never overwhelmed
 and this persists with most of the tryptamines.
 Now sometimes it is overwhelmed.
 But when it's overwhelmed it's the last thing to be overwhelmed
 and the first thing to pop back into existence
 at the end of the period of overwhelmment.
 So sometimes on ayahuasca you just lose it for a period of time,
 twenty minutes or something.
 But then you reconstruct and you're there like a little cork
 floating up to the top of the ocean.
 "Oh, here I am. It's me again."
 So this is very important to be able to observe.
 With DMT the reason it's so fascinating is because the input, the content
 seems to be almost entirely confined to the visual cortex.
 It's something that you look at and it comes toward you and it relates to you.
 There is a weird distortion of body image, but it's small potatoes
 compared to most of what's going on.
 And you can maintain this I-Thou relationship.
 So my tastes may be narrower than some people.
 Some people just like to get fucked up.
 And they go one way and then another and a few reds and a shot of this
 and a hit of that.
 There's really nothing to be frightened about with the elves.
 It sounds like they could be demons if they want to be.
 They could be. They're demonic.
 They've never done anything bad to me.
 It's that their humor.
 It's like being trapped in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
 We all know how funny a Bugs Bunny cartoon is, but have you noticed that
 their humor is all based on explosions, falling anvils, and agony?
 And so imagine if you were actually in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
 It's a parody of that situation.
 I don't know. The vibe of these creatures is very strange.
 They're knowledge holders.
 I've often thought that what they were was meme traders
 because they had the same feeling that I associated with the Indian hashish traders.
 They're meme traders.
 When they spread out all this stuff in front of you and are saying,
 "Look at this. Look at this. These marvelous jeweled objects."
 These are things they are selling.
 They want to trade.
 They're asking, "What have you got? What can you show us?
 Your Rolex, your fountain pen, your political beliefs, your sexual orientation.
 What do you want to trade?"
 So they're sort of like cosmic pack rats.
 Pack rats will take something, but they always leave something.
 Have you ever dealt with pack rats?
 Pack rats are fascinating because if one finds you,
 it will leave an object in trade for whatever it takes.
 The trick is to work it your way.
 You give it a paper clip. It gives you a fountain pen.
 There are stories in the gold country of Colorado and California
 of people having relationships with pack rats where they were trading at thumbtacks
 and it was bringing them gold nuggets.
 They had enough gold nuggets that they could leave off trading with varmints and get a life.
 [laughter]
 [unclear]
 Do psychedelics always make people kinder and gentler?
 Do they make us kinder and gentler?
 Well, that's an interesting question.
 As I get older, I ask it slightly differently of myself.
 I ask the question, "If this stuff is so great,
 what is so great about us that we're any different from anybody else?"
 Or are we just like holy rollers and rolfers and Taoists and Hasidic Jews
 and everybody else who thinks they've found the final answer?
 What is so great about it?
 The answer to your question is, "I don't think so."
 I think of the Yanomami culture.
 Certainly from the exterior, this looks like a fairly brutal culture.
 It's the only culture where DMT is a regularly abused drug
 and the men blasted up each other's nostrils with these hollow tubes.
 Then the name of the game is two guys square off.
 You plant your feet flat on the ground,
 and the guy who goes first hits the other guy as hard as he can
 with the flat of his palm in the chest.
 The game is to knock the person over.
 You absorb this blow, and then it's your turn.
 You get up and you do it.
 These two guys, totally loaded, saliva flying to the four winds,
 will stand and do this until somebody has knocked off their pins.
 Then you ask them, "What's going on here?
 Is this like the Super Bowl? Is this fun for you guys?"
 They explain that they have demons that live in their chest,
 and they collect these demons on their psychedelic trips.
 The more demons you have, the harder it is to knock you over.
 So they're doing this thing.
 But they're also lacerating each other with clubs and this sort of thing.
 I think that it's fouled up.
 I have the faith that if you have psychedelic religious ritual
 in combination with group sex in a small tribal group
 whose economy is based on nomadic pastoralism,
 that then it will be very, very hard for these people to maintain a neurotic lifestyle.
 But that if you interfere with any of this, then you'll get anxiety.
 And so you have psychedelic cultures, but the Yanomamo,
 this is a culture of male dominance and sexual anxiety
 and a lot of tweaked stuff.
 But I think that the main thing is that the cultural group
 must take the psychedelic frequently enough that the ego does not form,
 and that the specific manifestation of ego that you want to watch out for
 is concern for male paternity.
 That once it's gone that far, it's lost,
 because then there's male-male rivalry for women and territory.
 Yeah.
 I wanted to go back to the Irish elves for a second.
 My wife came across an article--she's Irish--
 and came across an article last year
 drawing a loose connection between the ancient sweat houses
 and the possibility of seasonal ceremonial use of shrooms.
 We sent you that article.
 I remember that article.
 Can you follow that up in light of your--
 having written the introduction to the--
 The Celtic faith, or the fairy faith in Celtic countries.
 Well, it would be very interesting to prove psilocybin use in ancient Ireland.
 People who have been to places like Ionia and like that
 say they're just overrun with mushrooms.
 And yet it's not explicit in any Celtic source.
 There's a lot of psilocybin in Europe.
 I mean, I was surprised.
 I thought that it occurred rarely,
 and so you could make the argument that it was possibly there.
 But last year when I did a speaking tour of Germany,
 and we were from Hamburg clear down to Munich and into Switzerland,
 everywhere there were mushrooms.
 And we would talk like we're talking here and then have lunch recess,
 and people would come back two hours later with small grocery bags
 full of these things.
 Well, I don't understand the peculiar--
 There must be something we don't quite grok
 about why the mushroom image is taboo.
 Maybe because it looks like a penis,
 but that doesn't really sound right to me.
 But why is it so rarely portrayed in all these areas
 where it must have been used?
 For instance, in the northwest coast of Oregon and Washington,
 there are something like 22 indigenous species of psilocybin,
 no anthropological record of mushroom use by the northwest coast Indians
 who were clearly paying attention.
 I mean, when you look at their carving and painting,
 they were paying attention.
 Where is the record of the mushroom use?
 In ancient Ireland and throughout the Celtic area,
 into Germany and Bohemia,
 no visible use of mushrooms.
 In the culture of old Europe that Maria Gambutas talks about,
 again, a prohibition of the image.
 So this is puzzling, not easy to understand.
 I would like to believe that in Africa 15,000 years ago,
 the primary religion of humanity was goddess-worshipping pastoralism
 based on sacramental use of mushrooms.
 But again, the physical evidence is just a few petroglyphs,
 drawings on stone,
 and it isn't a strongly proven case.
 So it's not well understood.
 It's hard to believe that the Irish weren't mixed up in this somehow.
 I mean, it seems so basic to the Irish soul.
 How many grams of mushrooms do you recommend taking?
 Five dried grams.
 And you should weigh it.
 You should invest in a little scale and weigh it
 because people eyeball it
 and they inevitably choose much less than is the correct amount.
 And if you're taking fresh mushrooms,
 you should take like 60 grams, you know,
 because it dries down by a factor of more than 9 to 1.
 You're referring to Cubensis?
 Cubensis. We're always talking about Stropharycubensis
 because that's the one people cultivate.
 Some of the wild ones are stronger,
 and they can be taken in smaller amounts.
 But I think it's good to take Stropharycubensis
 because then you know what you're getting.
 Because some of these small psilocybes
 look physically very much like Galerina species
 that have irreversible liver-destructive toxins in them.
 So if you eat a Galerina, you'll have a very bad experience
 or maybe a very good experience,
 but none of us will ever know.
 Speaking of mushrooms, how about the Amanita muscaria?
 I've heard a book called "Con" on that.
 Well, this is a very controversial mushroom
 that occurs worldwide.
 You all know this mushroom, the red one with the white dots on top of it,
 the toadstool of European mythology.
 It's used in Siberia and places like that as an intoxicant,
 and Gordon Wasson thought that it was the basis of soma.
 But it now looks like it probably isn't the basis of soma
 and that it's very variable, seasonally variable,
 geographically variable, genetically variable.
 So you never know what you're going to get.
 It's very hard to obtain a reliable, desirable intoxication from that mushroom.
 It's another one of these.
 There are a lot of these things that are sickening and distorting
 and that after you've gone through a night with them,
 you feel reborn because you're so damn glad you lived through it.
 But they're not really psychedelic.
 Any other questions?
 [Audience member] I'd like to say something before about this idea of dead ancestors.
 I saw a man recently in some news magazine that stated
 just because they're dead doesn't mean they're smart.
 And actually, they had an IQ test that you can give to them.
 [Laughter]
 An IQ test to your ancestors?
 [Audience member] They said that most of the entities have been channeled.
 Well, that's great. We've needed that for a long time.
 Just the simple test for grammatical correctness would eliminate...
 [Audience member] The other thing I was going to say was that I've had some experience with ketamine
 and I did not find it at all distorted my central observer self,
 the way you talked about detour.
 And I think at the height of a DMT trip,
 you wouldn't be able to do much for the fire in the house either.
 When you take a psychedelic that powerful, ketamine or DMT,
 you make sure you put yourself in a situation
 where you don't have to worry about physical surroundings whatsoever.
 True. But the thing that I noticed about ketamine
 is the first thing that happens is you stop worrying.
 The very first thing, before there's any manifestation of any symptom whatsoever,
 you get this kind of, "Oh, what the hell?"
 And that's the sign that it's beginning.
 But it's also the sign that you're not paying attention like you should.
 [Audience member] The first couple of times I did it, I was finally scared, I was dying.
 Well, I think it also depends on the dose. How much did you do?
 [Audience member] Fifty milligrams to a hundred milligrams.
 Yeah, well, see, I didn't do it that many times,
 and each time I did it quite a bit.
 And it was reality obliterating for sure.
 I've noticed that people who get into ketamine
 tend to dose downward rather than upward,
 tend to settle in somewhere around 50.
 And this is probably--I shouldn't even be speaking about it
 because I don't know what 50 is like. I know what 150 is like.
 [Audience member] You know what that does? It's where you're bringing it back.
 With the DMT, the main thing is, at first you think,
 "My God, how could anyone ever retain or remember any of this?"
 But it's really that you have to learn to control your own astonishment,
 that it's like having a heart attack of wonder.
 And after you've had the experience three or four times,
 you just learn to be cool.
 You say, "You know, I'm not going to give way
 to a bunch of exclamations about how amazing this is."
 And they tell you to do that.
 They say, "Don't start raving about how amazing it is.
 Pay attention to what we're doing.
 We know that you're blown out. We know that you're amazed.
 Yes, yes. Now pay attention to this."
 And then they try to convey this linguistic thing,
 this visible language.
 And I don't understand what this is all about.
 Has this always been what they've tried to convey?
 Is the message always the same?
 Is there a new urgency about visible language?
 Or how much of the message is already present in me?
 Is it a message tailored for me?
 Like this question of whether or not these things are ancestors.
 Then you get into questions like, "What ancestors are they?"
 Like I do not feel when I break into the DMT space
 that this is my dead mother or my grandparents.
 I feel that it's more that it's just sort of local spirits.
 Grandma who became a self-transforming machine.
 Yes, who would have thought?
 A little white-haired old lady.
 And then sometimes I think that the reason it's so hair-raising
 is because the chief soul in this weird place is actually your soul.
 And that the hair-raising aspect is it's not just any dead person
 or a dead relative. It's you dead.
 And that's the one thing that causes the whole thing to shimmy
 and fall apart and go into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance.
 When you realize that the entity you're dealing with is yourself
 beyond the grave, then you just flood out in the amazement,
 wonder, horror, and disbelief department
 and lose the focus and come down.
 Back here.
 [unclear]
 Yes.
 Small people.
 Well, five grams is what I think would destroy most of the resistances
 of a 145-pound person.
 A person who weighed 90 pounds could take far less.
 But a person who weighed 90 pounds who took five grams
 should be in no physical danger.
 You can play with it.
 But at higher doses it gets stranger and stranger
 and stranger and stranger.
 I mean, anything above eight, you're definitely a pioneer
 as far as I'm concerned.
 But it's a good point.
 If you weigh 90 pounds, you maybe don't want to chow down
 on five grams right on the get-go.
 But the key is to do more rather than less
 because otherwise you can miss the point.
 Can you say something about that?
 I know I've had numerous trips on different substances
 where I felt like I took too little and it was almost more horrifying
 than if I just knocked myself over.
 Yeah, well I think where the trouble comes is in the sub-threshold doses
 where you're neither fish nor fowl and you're thrashing around in it
 and you get into these loops of psychological, abrasive psychological
 self-examination and stuff like that.
 And what you want to do is you just want to blast through all that.
 It's hard.
 Can you sing through that?
 Yeah, you can sing through that.
 So that's one of the things that you use to sing through to get through that.
 Yeah. Singing and cannabis are my techniques
 and together I seem to be able to move it around.


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